The Big Huge Effects Pack!
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Shoot, looks like I missed that part in my little tutorial. As was pointed out, I created the new vis_effect from scratch. In general I tried to do that for every new effect I made just so I don’t have to overwrite any vanilla references.
In retrospect, it would have made sense to include a general tutorial for referencing a brand new ALE from scratch. Specifically because I just threw all the ALE files into a zip and figured that people could figure out on their own how to utilize them. People who aren’t very familiar with FL modding really wouldn’t know where to start if they wanted to integrate the new effects into their mod.
Thanks for pointing the issues out you two.
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Yeh, now you see why it’s so important to make proper connected tutorials, not a jumble of bits and say “it’s not for beginners”.
I didn’t think my pal Gibbon was a beginner until I read this topic!
ROFL
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BOO YAH!!! looks awsome when implemented in my mod.
however, i think the torp explosions are a bit big. stations dissapear in the explosive glory of a starkiller.also, the effects lag my craptop when i fire torps or normal missiles. that was to be expected with a machine that was mediocre in 2003
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i have sometimes the issue, that, if e.g. many starships are in visible range with their trails, the trails are not drawn entirely. this is likely because of the max onscreen fx limit, isn’t it? ive asked this multiple weeks ago and still did not recieve any answer. is there a way to increase this value and what is this way, if it is figured out?
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I think this may be a problem with effects outside of their draw distance, like with the transports that have their engine effects missing at a certain distance. Since you are talking about engine trails then go to FX/effect_types.ini and find EFT_ENGINE_FIRE their at the bottom of the block of code are the pbubble values that define the close and far draw distances, to make it possible for viewing if from a distance change the second value to something bigger eg.
pbubble = 75, 4500
Now you can see it from 4.5Km away! Go ahead and change this value on all the types of effect so you can see them further!
Ozed
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Has anyone notied that the pbubble values are sometimes the same, i.e.
pbubble = 1000, 1000
What is the effect of this?
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nah, that’s not what i mean. its not related to visibility range. sometimes even my own trail shatters though in open clean space i always see it entirely. it is very likely related to the max fx count. cuz i usually experience it within beautiful battles (where i, to test fx fly out somewhere like new tokyo and start shooting all the neutrals and friendlies). due to all of the debris trails and explosions (ive played around with it to make it look sweet) fx start to disappear. e.g. a smoky missile i fire has a trail of perhaps a dozen smoke parts, not more. or e.g. if i fly a battleship with defense weapons (yes, by myself i managed to get a weapon that is only useful to defend the starship in my mod), the amount of fx make them disappear partially and the engine exhausts, too. the visibility range stays as it has been before anyway (e.g. those missile has a max pbubble of 7000, so this is definately not the reason).
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Uhh…
Have you ever tried to play with pals for fun, instead of just trying to break the limits all alone? rofl
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spam…
well, i’d need pals for such.
or a better count of clients. however, i try to make it as good as i can, as beatiful as i can. asking here has so far usually increased my abilities and so improved the mod and increased the clients’ enjoinment. isn’t every modder after this?^^ -
Thanks Why, your first FX pack drove me away from FL, and now when you have released the revised edition I’m coming back. Thx
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It’s a thanks, don’t worry. It wasn’t you who made me go away from FL. It was myself. But thats over now and I’m back, and I’m thinking of creating an .ale generator, which would simplify the process of making FXes.
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Gisteron wrote:
problem is, we do not know everything exactly. but maybe a prog could be done for outgame effect renderings using the alchemy.dll.I thought of creating a database of all the different alchemy commands and insert variables into that.
When creating an effect, one would add a state, which corresponds to an appearance and logic node in the .ale, of a type listed in the database. When a type is selected, the application loads it and shows the variables that are “changeable” for the given state.The states would interact as if they were keyframes in the effect timeline (%). The states would then change to the next state through time. This would be called a stateflow.
Furthermore, each effect would consist of a number of parts i.e. (head, trail, etc.) and each of the parts would have exactly one stateflow.
After changing all the values, one would choose the output location and then commence the generation sequence by clicking a button.
w0dk4 wrote:
A particle effect editor for FL with preview would be awesome!Sure it would, but the poor FL would not take all those fancy new shinning FSes that will be put in it after we’d discovered such a tool.
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Have a look at the XML Project source for the ALE structure (crc.cpp contains the names and ale.cpp decodes the format).
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Thanks adoxa, I was about to ask whether there is any reference material.
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There was some mention a while back that someone found traces of the use of 3DSMax to construct parts of FL.
Has anyone explored making ale’s using 3D modeler functions?
I came across Blender’s capability today and wondered if it could be adapted by anyone knowledgeable:
http://www.packtpub.com/article/getting-started-with-blender-particle-system-1 -
LightWave has similar effect, too, just watch why’s work or Star Trek 6, 10, or Battlestar Galactica or, yes, even Avatar was at least partially made with LightWave. actually, the freelancer graphics engine is also only an OpenGL engine (don’t hurt, if its wrong, please :D) and also does support the same parameters for particle emitters so a recreation of them to blender format or lightwave3d or 3ds maya or cinema4d, yes maybe even 3ds max is possible, maybe even a plugin could be made to rewrite the alchemy source to a file code for one of these rendering programs. (even better would be a reverse of that, as you could make the effect first and than export it to ale)
